I have rather unkindly sliced a vertical slice out of one of the photos, of a truly extraordinary post (I mean a physical post in the road - not a piece of internetting), which is covered from the top almost to the bottom in The Wires!!!

But, maybe this is an oblique reference to The Wires!!!:

“The reason we constructed frames was to filter the surrounding environment, which changes fast in an unforeseeable manner,” explained architects Hyoungnam Lim and Eunjoo Roh.

They constantly take away some The Wires!!!, and install new The Wires!!!, in different places. Could that be what architects Hyoungnam Lim and Eunjoo Roh are, rather delicately, referring to?

What all these Don’t Mention The Wires!!! stories suggest to me is that these are countries (the other big one being Japan) where electronic communication arrived when people were still very poor in other ways, and any politician who tried to restrain The Wires!!! to make them prettier, but more expensive, would be hanged by them. Western trained aesthetes don’t like it, but know there’s nothing they can do.

I also recall hearing once about how in Japan, all buildings tend to be more temporary, because of earthquakes and all timber construction and suchlike, and that even religious buildings get torn down and rebuilt in another spot from time to time. And if it’s temporary, who cares what it looks like? If they want to make it pretty, fine. If not, also fine. If The Wires!!! will soon be different The Wires!!!, no worries. Let The Wires!!! go where they want.

But what do I know? I’m only babbling on like this to make entirely sure that this posting is longer than the post.

Looking at this some more, I do wonder if those architects maybe persuaded the electricians to rearrange these particular South Korean The Wires!!!, so that they are less visible from the Architecture, and if those frames, mentioned above, are as they are so that The Wires!!! cannot be seen through them. They act like blinkers, in other words.

If so, it should have been explained more clearly. As it is, we can only guess.

Camera makers have been trying for 150 years to develop an all-in-one camera that satisfies the needs of most photographers. The Nikon Coolpix P600 comes closer to filling that order than any of the other ultra-zooms I’ve tested to date, taking into account the issues at the wide-angle end of that monster zoom.

I love zoom. My current amount of zoom is x24. But, I really love zoom. And there have been cameras out there, like this one with its x60 zoom, for quite a while now. I was cautious, fearing that other things would have been sacrificed too much, for too much zoom, too soon. But it is clear that Nikon’s marketeers have a wire attached to my mind and have been reading it:

The P600 was obviously designed for photography enthusiasts, by photography enthusiasts. Photographers who purchase the P600 will need to have realistic expectations – any camera with a 60x zoom is bound to be the result of countless mechanical, optical, electrical, and functional/operational compromises, and every one of those compromises is going to affect image quality in some way. The P600 will appeal to serious photographers who want to be able to cover a very broad zoom range of photographic genres without having to carry a heavy DSLR, a sturdy tripod, and a bag full of very expensive lenses.

And, he might have added, who doesn’t want to be wasting vital seconds faffing about with swapping lenses, while an animal like a cat or a digital photographer abandons the pose that got you (me) all excited, just before you (I) take the shot.

They also include a twiddly screen, which for me (me) is an absolute, no-twiddly-screen-no-sale, must.

Overall, the P600 does a remarkably good job of making those compromises palatable.

So, could this be my next camera?

Reviewers also mention that it is quite light, light as in not heavy I mean.

Best of all, although Amazon wants £500 for the P600, Amazon also kindly let me know that there is now a P610, which is a P600 and just a teeny bit more so, for under £300.

I am very tempted. But I have been so happy with my x24 Lumix camera that I have not been paying attention to the camera market, until I happened to go back to it today. Not only was I unaware of the existence, since several years back, of the Nikon Coolpix P610. I also failed to clock the fact that since it was introduced, in about 2013 or some such year, the Nikon Coolpix P610 has acquired a bigger, more expensive and even zoomier younger brother, the Nikon Coolpix P900. The Nikon Coolpix P610 is a cool red colour ...:

... but the Nikon Coolpix P900, maybe because it is aimed at money-less-of-a-problem semi-pro types (rather than at “enthusiasts"), is boring black:

The Nikon Coolpix P900 is also more expensive, and heavier, and heaviness is starting to be as much of a problem for me as expense always has been. Is the Nikon Coolpix P900 worth that extra expense and extra weight, just to get x83 (!!) zoom, instead of a mere x60 zoom? I am thinking, maybe not.

But mostly, what I am thinking is: that I would like to be able to compare these two cameras in a shop. Remember those? To see just how much these two cameras differ in bulk and weight. This is the kind of thing that is hard to see from mere pictures, even if they tell you the weights in numbers.

And no sooner is the thought thought, than it is investigated, because this, as I keep being reminded, is the world we now live in. Next stop, I think, will be a place like this, just to see if they’ll let me hold these two cameras, one in each hand, to compare and contrast.

In it, Richard J. Evans criticised some of the more casual observers of the libel case that his book described, for arguing that David Irving ought to be allowed to write what he wanted, as if the case was all about David Irving’s right to be heard. But it was not. It was about whether David Irving could silence one of his more prominent critics, Deborah Lipstadt, who had called him a bad historian and a Holocaust denier.

Yet, there was a reason why this error kept getting made by less than conscientious observers of this case, as Evans himself explained (p. 201):

Yet as the trial got under way, it quickly became apparent that lrving was going to find it difficult to set the agenda. The bias of the English law of defamation brings its own perils for the unwary Plaintiff. By placing the entire burden of proof on the defence, it allows them to turn the tables and devote the action to destroying the reputation of their accuser. Indeed, once the defence has admitted, as Lipstadt’s did without hesitation, that the words complained of mean what they say and are clearly defamatory, justifying them in detail and with chapter and verse is the only option left to them. A successful libel defence therefore has to concentrate, in effect, on massively defaming the person and character of the Plaintiff, the only restriction being that the defamation undertaken in court has to be along the same lines as the defamation that gave rise to the case in the first place, and that it has, of course, to be true. The defence had to prove that Lipstadt’s accusations of Holocaust denial and historical falsification were justified in Irving’s case. Thus it was lrving, not Lipstadt, whose reputation was on the line. By the end of the third week of the trial, as Neal Ascherson observed, the defence had thus succeeded in turning the tables, ‘as if David lrving were the defendant and Deborah Lipstadt the plaintiff’, an observation shared by other commentators too. ‘In the relentless focus on Irving’s beliefs,’ wrote Jenny Booth in the Scotsman, ‘it was easy to forget that it was actually Lipstadt’s book which was on trial. Increasingly it seemed that it was Irving himself.’

Having thus put himself on trial, Irving was then found to be guilty as charged.

Certainly in London and I presume everywhere else in Britain, when you see lots of verbiage attached to the outside of a building site, it tends to be health and safety stuff, of the sort shown in this posting, which I did here in February 2011. (That was the very first posting I did with the category “Signs and notices” attached to it.)

In the summer of that same year, I was in France, where I took the picture that follows. But I never got around to displaying it here. Here it is now:

This is a sign that I saw adorning the outside of a French building site.

To me, it resembles nothing so much as the credits at the end of a movie. Every imaginable contributor to the building process is painstakingly listed. Click if you want to be able to read everything more clearly.

Although I am sure I might be persuaded otherwise (for instance by people with knowledge of the relative merits of the actual work that tends to be done in each country), I think the contrast is rather in France’s favour.

In France, everything that has been done, and by whom, is listed. Presumably it has been done in a manner to make the people who did it glad to have their names in, as it were, lights. In Britain, every imaginable thing that might go wrong is listed, in the form of an imprecation that people not do this. It’s the difference between being proud of what is being done, and being nothing but apologetic about it.

Right at the end, though, it does say: “chantier interdet au public, port du casque obligatoire”. This means (unless the internet has gravely deceived me): “access forbidden to the public, helmet obligatory”. So, a bit of health and safety nagging there. But that’s all there is.

In Britain, you also sometimes get a rather shorter list of the grander and more professional of the enterprises and people who are doing the job, but not nearly so much is made of this, compared to all the stuff about being ever so, ever so careful.

I like Palestra House, outside Southwark Tube. It’s a bit trashy and seventies looking, but I like it. Especially in nice weather, as it was when I recently photoed it, on the right here:

On the left is how Palestra House was looking on March 31st 2005. There was a faked-up picture of what they thought it would look like on the outside of the site, but you never really know these days, by which I mean for the last three decades or so. Although, there was an early clue, in the form of the beginnings of the glass cladding, as you can see.

One definition of Modern Movement modernism sixties vintage (as opposed to the later and more stylish versions), would be to say that when it was being built you did know only too well what it was going to look like. It was going to look like … that. And that … was not good.

I think that Palestra House, on the other hand, turned out quite good.

May 2005 was when I first really started noticing my fellow photographers. My archives show that I had been noticing a bit before then, but that was when I really started taking photoer photos, to the point where there are now enough from that time for me now to choose only the ones where faces are not revealed, and still have plenty to pick the best of:

My favourite is 4.3, the penultimate one. The proof that I was getting serious was that I took lots of shots of this guy, which meant that the best shot was good of him and his amazing posture, and it was good of his camera, which like most of them, is of a sort you no longer see.

It is particularly noticeable how many cameras were silver coloured, in those far off days. Now dedicated cameras are mostly black.

So, that white cat above, for instance. It adds an extra something that the white cat is surrounded by a white window frame, and that it is black behind the white cat. And, neither the cat nor the window frame would be as white if it were not for the blue wall.

So, go to Mick Hartley. You may not want to read the whole thing just because I do. But, look at the whole thing.

When G(od)D(aughter) 1 and I left the Park View Cafe, the weather was still grim, as you can see in this picture, which is of an amazing building which we encountered just a few yards down the road:

I was amazed. But so amazed enough that I forgot to take a closer photo of all that signage so I could look it up later.

What is it? And more to the point, what was it? Because nobody says “We need a place to do indoor pretend rock climbing” and builds themselves something like that.

Well, here is the website for what it is now. And here you can read about what it was originally built to accommodate:

For a small district, Stoke Newington is endowed with a generous amount of open space. To its north, there is the extensive West Reservoir, now a non-working facility, but open for leisure and surrounded by greenspace, at the entrance to which is the architecturally bizarre Castle Climbing Centre, once the main Water Board pumping station. It was designed, by William Chadwell Mylne, to look like a towering Scottish castle.

There should be more fake castles of this sort. Why don’t people build such things now? You’d think with all the current fascination with fantasy movies, Harry Potter, and so forth, there’d be rock and roll royalty queueing up to erect more stuff like this. Do they not even try? Or, do they try, but are they then rebuffed by boring local planning committees, frightened that if they allowed such things, before you knew it, everyone would be building whatever they liked.

“Castle Climbing Centre” ought to mean a Centre where you learn to Climb Castles. But, it doesn’t.

We start (top left) with a view of a photographer on the Millennium Footbridge, and end with a clutch of photos taken on Tower Bridge. In between, I walk from the first bridge to the second, along the south bank.

As you can see, smartphone cameras continue to predominate:

As you can see, I am becoming every more careful to avoid showing recognisable - especially automatically-computer-recognisable – faces. I have even included one photo (bottom right) where the whole point and fun of it is that a passing car hid the lady’s face, and thus caused the resulting photo to qualify for inclusion in this posting.

Also, I like that effect you get with glasses (top right), where you get a more focussed version through them of the otherwise blurry background.

I have been reading Richard J. Evans’s account of the libel trial which took place at the High Court in 2000, in which David Irving sued the American historian Deborah Lipstadt, and her publisher Penguin Books. In one of her books, Lipstadt had called Irving a bad and dishonest non-historian, and Irving was trying to suppress this opinion. Irving lost.

Richard J. Evans was the expert witness who did most to blow Irving’s claims to be an honest and effective historian out of the water.

The Evans book is entitled Telling Lies About Hitler. At the end of the chapter in it entitled “In The Witness Box” (p. 231), Evans recounts a truly extraordinary moment, right at the end of the court proceedings:

And when it came to rebutting the defence charge of consorting with neo-Nazis in Germany, Irving’s habit of improvising from his prepared text led him into a fatal slip of the tongue, as he inadvertently addressed the judge as ‘Mein Fuhrer’. Everyone in court knew that he was referring to the judge as ‘Mein Fuhrer’ from the tone of voice in which he said it. The court dissolved into laughter. ‘No one could believe what just happened,’ wrote one spectator. ‘Had we imagined it? Could he have addressed the judge as “Mein Fuhrer”?’ Irving himself denied having made the slip. But amid the laughter in court, he could be seen mumbling an apology to the judge for having addressed him in this way. Perhaps the slip was a consequence of Irving’s unconscious identification of the judge as a benign authority figure. Whatever the reason for it, with the laughter still ringing in its ears, the court adjourned on 15 March 2000 as the judge prepared the final version of his judgment on the case.

This is perfect. My life today, in the last few days, and for the last few weeks, has been one mad social whirl after another, my contented solitude being having been violated seemingly every other evening and sometimes more often even than that, which is all fun and all that, but I find that an evening out puts a blight on creativity for the entire day, because what if I start something, want to finish it, but then don’t have time to, because I have a social whirl to attend and to get ready for and to find my way to and to find out about finding my way to? Last night I whirled out to watch theatrical stuff in an unfamiliar and transportationally complicated part of town with a theatrical friend. Tonight, I face another social whirl, to meet Perry II. Every time I go out I take photos, but because of all this going out I have no time to show them to you people or not with the sort of insightful commentary that I want to attach to them without which what’s the point? - They’re just pictures.

So tomorrow (a day during which I have nothing else planned), I will stay in all day, and try (although I promise nothing) to do here a mammoth day of catch-up blogging, showing you a tiny fraction of the pictures I have been taking lately, all properly explained, and anything else I’ve been meaning to put here for some time that I decide to put here tomorrow, in not one, not two, but many postings.

Today I went on one of my regular walkabouts. But it was different from almost all other walkabouts I can remember, in that this time, this time, I returned home convinced that I had taken a lot of, by my reckoning, really very good photos. I knew that this time, I would not have to go through the usual ordeal of looking at them, becoming depressed, only returning to my clutch of photos a few days later to rescue whatever photographic merit I might then find. So it has already proved, only a couple of hours after me getting home. I looked at the photos and an amazing number of them were … really very good. I think.

Here is just one, for now, one among many that I already know that I like:

Big Thing, tick. Roof clutter, tick. But what I really like is how some of the roof clutter is dark, while some of it is sunlit, and the sunlit stuff has an obligingly dark Big Thing behind it, to set it off.

I didn’t meander about making this happen. It just happened. (Although, I did have to do a little bit of rotating. Sorry about that. I can only assure you that this will almost certainly happen again because the combination of me and my camera (with its twiddly screen) seems to make me rotate pictures when I take them, a lot.)

Just before taking these photos, on a very sunny afternoon earlier this month, I photoed this oriental lady, apparently using her sunglasses as some kind of photographic filter:

On the left, she is photoing the Wheel. On the right: Big Ben and Parliament. I have removed her face from what I am showing you, but it’s a shame I didn’t catch the picture she was taking on her smartphone. There would have been no harm done showing you that.

It was hard to tell if she had done this kind of thing before, shoving her sunglasses in front of her smartphone. As I say, it was a very sunny day, so maybe not. On the other hand, maybe yes, because it would seem that sunglasses are a very big deal for this lady, this next image being a close-up crop from the picture above, top left, of the lady’s painted nails:

Those are sunglasses, are they not? Or, aliens? Aliens wearing sunglasses?

But then again maybe she hadn’t done anything like this before, because if she had she might have gone straight to this excellent arrangement, instead of appearing only to arrive at it rather slowly:

I have not seen this done before, by anyone. This time I did catch the picture she was taking, reflected in her sunglasses.

That last photo is the money shot, or it would be if anyone were ever to pay me money for my photos, which they will not (see the posting immediately below).

As already related here, I had a delightful day out with G(od)D(aughter) 1, way back whenever that was. And I got as far as telling you that we had succeeded, with the help of our mobile phones, in meeting up, not (as I wrongly related (apologies to anyone inconvenienced or insulted)) at the “Manor Park” Cafe, but at the Park View Cafe. And I also wrote about how I nearly didn’t have my mobile phone with me, and about how inconvenient that would have been.

Once settled inside the Manor Park View Cafe, GD1 and waited for the rain to stop, and conversed.

GD1 was full of apologies for the fact that she had kept on postponing our expedition. I, on the other hand, was rather pleased about these postponements, because they were caused by pressure of work, GD1’s work as a professional photographer. And I think that her being faced with pressure of work is good. Getting established as a professional photographer has been a bit of a struggle for her, but now the struggle seems to be paying off.

Another sign that GD1 is now photographically busier than she had been in former years was that she felt the need to apologise also about not having done much recent photoing for the sheer fun of it, as I constantly do, and as the two of us were about to do again. “You put me to shame” was the phrase she used, in one of her emails to me before this latest walkabout. But again, I see that as a good sign. I mean, if you have spent a day taking important photographs for a demanding client, and being sustained in your efforts by the expectation of money, would your idea of a fun way to wind down be to go out and take yet more photos, with nobody paying you? That she does rather less fun photoing than she once did means, again, that she is probably busier doing work photoing. Good. Under the circumstances, it was all the more kind of her to be willing to share a day with me doing this now, for her, ever so slightly uncongenial thing.

At the Park View Cafe, GD1 and I discussed the fact that, although becoming an established professional photographer may be a struggle, this line of business still most definitely exists.

Not that long ago, some were predicting that the ubiquity of cheap-and-cheerful cameras, wielded by cheap-and-cheerful photographers like me, would drive the formerly professional photographers out of business. Well, it did drive some of the old pro photographers out of business. But the world now is at least as full as ever it was of pro photographers, including many who started out as cheap-and-cheerful digital amateurs.

Yes, there have been big changes in the photography business, as my friend Bruce the Real Photographer long ago told me, when digital cameras first started catching on. And change often registers first as bad news for existing practitioners, who then have to adapt fast or go out of business. Because yes, lots of the kinds of photos that Real Photographers like Bruce used to charge for are now taken by amateurs instead. Family portraits, for instance. If you take photos of your kids constantly, you are pretty much bound to get lucky with some of them, and that’s all most people probably want.

And yes, amateurs like me can sometimes take nice wedding pictures. But, would you want to rely on the amateurs to take those crucial never-to-be-posed-for again wedding moments, just for the sake of a few dozen quid? I think not.

Or consider the house-selling trade. The phrase “false economy” is the one that best explained why there will always be professional photographers alive and well in that line of business. Imagine you are trying to sell a house, perhaps for several million quid. Does it really make sense to rely on some fun-photographer like me to try to make the place look its best? No it does not. A crappy set of house photos or a flattering set of house photos could be the difference between sale and no-sale, a difference that could be worth hundreds of thousands of pounds or more. So, not spending a few hundred quid making sure that the photos are non-crappy is … a false economy.

In general, whenever the economic difference made by good photos dwarfs the mere cost of good photos, then good photos will be demanded, and good photos will be paid for.

Here is a rather crappy picture which I recently took, of a non-crappy picture of a house interior, a house recently featured in the Guardian, a house which is (fingers crossed, for it is now (or was until very recently) owned by a good friend of mine) about to change hands for several million quid:

That’s a photo of a glossy brochure, devoted to this one, highly desirable house. The house-sellers paid quite a lot for that glossy brochure. For the same reason, they paid quite a lot for the photos in it. Why would they not? My friend described the mysterious things the photographer did with light when he visited. “Ambient” light, was it? I can’t even remember. A simple way of putting it would be to say that if a muggins photographer like me had taken the photos, the garden would either have been invisibly white or the rooms would have been invisibly dark. Plus, more generally, and for reasons I don’t even understand, it wouldn’t have looked like nearly such a desirable place. No wonder the guy who took this photo makes a living at it. And I’ll bet he doesn’t any longer go out fun-photoing in his spare time, any more than GD1 now does.

So, in the short run, Bruce the Real Photographer was suddenly faced with a hoard of crappy photographers like me, taking all the “good enough” photos that he had been taking, and he had to adjust to that by finding other photos to take. This was not fun for him, at all. But meanwhile, the same digitalisation-of-everything process that was making such miseries for Bruce the Real Photographer was also creating a whole new world of internettery where photos are now required. Most of these photos need only be “good enough”, so Bruce the Real Photographer can no more make a living doing them than he can make a living with the many of the photos that he had been taking for a living in his younger days. But, GD1, after a struggle, is finding work, illustrating all that internettery, for all those people - people like my friend’s house-sellers - for whom only very good is good enough.

If only because there are now so many more photos swirling about in the world, if you want your photos to stand out from the crowd, they need to be really good. And really good costs.

My guess is that the photography profession is now several times bigger in number than it used to be, before cheap digital cameras erupted.

I say similar things from time to time (for instance towards the end of this recent posting here about the changing context within which Samizdata now operates) about the impact of the internet on the old-school news media. Despite many individual failures to adapt to the new digital dispensation, and despite similar prophecies of doom at the start of the digital age, the Mainstream Media are in much the same sort of healthy state as, to adapt that phrase, Mainstream Photography. And the current non-plight of the Mainstream Media is not only analogous to the non-plight of Mainstream Photography, but yet another cause of that non-plight. After all, one of the biggest customers for Mainstream Photography is the Mainstream Media.

My name is Chrystal. I am 25 years old. I am from Chongqing. I like your page. How often do you visit the site? I really want to communicate with you. I am good at Thai massage and really like to eat fish. What about you? I guess that we will have many topics to talk about.

Do you have some social networks? I will be waiting for your letter.

Best wishes
Chrystal

I was pondering my reply to Chrystal, asking for clarification about this site I am supposed to be visiting, but going on to say that she really is a bit young for me.

But then, incoming, at 12.12pm:

Hi brian

How are you?

My name is Eugenia. I am 25 years old. I am from Chongqing. I like your page. How often do you visit the site? I really want to communicate with you. I am good at Thai massage and really like to eat fish. What about you? I guess that we will have many topics to talk about.

Do you have some social networks? I will be waiting for your letter.

Best wishes
Eugenia

Uncanny. Truly, truly uncanny. They even both said “hi brian” is the same giant blue letters. What are the odds? Presumably, I should continue with the composition of my reply, and send a copy to each of them. It’s almost as if one of them isn’t a real person. Or even – the horror – neither of them is. Does some terrible middle aged, male, ugly criminal want to know more about me, that he can then use to his advantage and to my disadvantage? If Eugenia hadn’t copied Chrystal’s email to me, these suspicious thoughts might never have occurred to me.

Seriously though, these sorts of (and all the other sorts of) bullshit emails pollute email, by making you assume that any email from anyone which seems even slightly off key is bollocks, even if it isn’t. You even think it may be bollocks if the person it’s from is someone that you know. Because, maybe someone else stole that person’s name, or just guessed it or chose it at random. I can remember when it actually made sense to trust incoming emails from strangers, unless they were obvious bullshit. Those days are long gone. At first, email seemed to create a bright new world of candour and of quick and easy communication. But emails like the ones above clog up the pipes. They may be a joke, but they are a joke we could all do without.

It’s true! Three of weeks ago, I was scratching about for a cricket cat connection, and all the time this cricket cat connection has been out there, and I never knew, until I followed a tweet at Cricinfo! And there it was! Philip Clive Roderick Tufnell (nickname: “The Cat”, or so somebody claims), former Middlesex and England spin bowler, now TMS commentator, painter, has climbed aboard the catwagon! Does he actually like cats? Is he merely hoping to get internet hits that are the envy of artists who prefer non-feline subjects? Who knows? Who cares?

Says Tufnell:

I think people are sometimes surprised that art is my thing. I got an O level in art at school (my only one – I was too busy playing cricket!) and my Dad was a silversmith, so there’s a history of creativity in my family. I even worked with my Dad for a while when I was turning professional, and I loved it.

I’m not a landscape water-colourist or anything – you won’t bump into me and my easel on a country walk! Instead, I love to work in abstract art and with different techniques. My studio is full of spray-paint cans, because I really like the effects I can create.

It was never a totally White Van, but someone has painted some white on it.

I recently saw another of these vans with something like “Chuck Norris is the only person who can slam a revolving door”, but my photoing reflexes were too slow to capture it. When I do photo this, I’ll try to remember that I said I might put the picture up here.

I agree with you. Yes, it is a good marketing strategy. Both of us are right about that. And I see that these arseholes have been helping.

Paris is, in certain Parisian minds anyway, suffering from London Big Thing Envy, and they want to change the place.

“The change in regulations is a historic moment,” the architects told Dezeen. “Paris is cautiously allowing tall buildings back into the city.”

Like Ken Livingstone, who did so much to make London’s recent Big Things happen, some of the Parisians angling most powerfully for Grand Choses are socialists.

But Big Things fit right in in London. In London the antiquarian tendency is weak when confronted by the We Want More Office Space tendency. But in Paris, it is the other way around. Paris already has a look that lots of people like, and scattering Grand Choses all over it will radically change that look. London has always grown in big ugly bursts of money-making, which everyone then gets used to and decides they like, so Big Things are just the latest version of a regular London process. Paris was kind of perfect in the late nineteenth century, and since then it has been half city, half museum. It was then neither bombed nor redeveloped by socialist maniacs, as London was. It will be interesting to see if this transformation of Paris can be made to stick or whether it will be stopped in its tracks once again.

Who saw that coming? Not me. Although in my defence, had Haddin not dropped Root on nought when England were 43-3 and would have been 43-4, it would surely have been a very different match (a match which, having not been dropped, Root (134 and 60 and two wickets at the end with his spin) is now presumably the Man of). And, I was definitely not the only one who reckoned Australia to be the stronger team, which they may yet prove to be. Although, this guy hedged his bets and had this to say:

A win for England and the series could be a classic.

I’d settle for a series win for England. Five nil would be nice. (Very nice.)

Meanwhile, as worrying for Australia as this loss is the fact that it looks like their much heralded bowling attack may be falling apart. Harris has retired hurt, and not temporarily. Now Starc is hobbling. Johnson will surely have his moments in this series. (He did today, but only with the bat when it was all over bar Mitchell Johnson having a good day with the bat.)

I started this posting when the ninth wicket fell, in anticipation. The tenth wicket did not cause any delays. England win by 169.

Last night I went awandering along the river, as I so often do, and outside that excellent (even though it’s fake) Globe Theatre, I saw all this:

As you can see, I concentrated on the guy with the very, very complicated camera. And I post pictures of him here, entirely recognisable ones, because, frankly, what he was doing was performing in public, just like the people he was filming or videoing or photoing or whatever it was that he was doing, “digital filming” being my preferred guess. He was smiling (1.3 - top row right). He was part of it. And there was a big crowd watching all this. He reminded me a bit of the guy who fronted this excellent TV show. But the funny thing is, because he was clearly enjoying himself so much, I can’t tell if this guy is a Real Photographer, or an amateur much like me, who has merely hired a Real Camera.

The event, according to snatches of conversation that I happened to hear, was some kind of charity do. The queue contained many rich-looking couples dressed to the nines. And the camera man was busily immortalising everything.

What go me posting all these pictures, just like old times here, was partly the sheer pleasure involved in doing something really complicated with Glorious Godot, so fast and so solid (such a contrast with wade through sewage little Judas). And partly it was picture 3.3, middle row on the right. I love that pose, like he’s crapping by the roadside when on a really awkward holiday in an awkward country, except that obviously he’s not doing that. So, what is he doing? The fact that we cannot see his camera means it all needs explaining, and I thought, well, better put in another picture to show what he was actually doing, and then I couldn’t choose, and then I thought … this will be easy with Godot and there you go.

I still have lots of catching up to do, so what shall I do tonight? I know I’ll go to a Barbecue at Chateau Samizdata. Which they invited me to. I didn’t just ring up and say I was coming round and would be using their barbecue.

I need to get out less, and this weather is not helping. I spent last night shovelling pictures from SD cards onto Godot (my mainframe computer) who has now returned, all the while revelling in how fast everything is, again, like wading through a vacuum. And now I have about a dozen catch-up type postings rattling around in my head, many of them involving recent photos, which I want to post all at once. But the weather out is just too good to ignore. Which means that by the end of today I will probably be even further behind.

But, I will now do one of these postings, which happens also to illustrate the excellence of the weather in London just now

Last night, on Westminster Bridge, I photoed a particularly excellent Bald Bloke Taking Photos. These two snaps of the gentleman in question make a nice pair, I think:

You can lose a test match on the first morning and England are well on the way to losing the first Ashes test in Cardiff, having already lost three wickets before lunch. England’s trouble is that their top four have none of them been in proper form of late, and the Australian bowlers are all just that bit too good for them to be able to solve this problem by batting themselves into some form against them. It will only get worse. If it gets better I will be delighted, but also surprised. As of now, I expect the result to be much as it was two years ago, when England shaded it three nil, except that it will be three nil to Australia, or something like that. This time, Australia are better, and England have less good batting (Bell has got worse basically) and two top bowlers who are two years more knackered, plus no Swann. So, England will lose. Anything better than that will be a bonus. We shall see.

And before anyone says I was plunged into doom by these three wickets, I was already pessimistic when it kicked off. I just wish I had put this an hour and a half sooner.

My mood is not helped by me still having to rely on my stupid laptop and it is like wading through sewage.

Also, I began the day with a Rameau harpsichord CD that had been on pause, and since it is one of those annoying CDs (a triple CD actually) without the tracks and timings on the cover, just in the inside booklet, it is hard to note where I am it in, so a CD started needs to be finished. And Rameau on the harpsichord, at any rate this particular Rameau on the harpsichord, was very minor key and lugubrious.

Every damn morning the laptop seems to insist on doing a “scheduled scan” (which always discovers nothing but takes for ever).. This is the sewage aspect. At least things on that front are now a bit better. (I was reminded about that by a little box bottom left saying Scan Completed 0/0 0/0 0/0 0/0 blah blah blah.)

Last night I watched a very depressing documentary about the holocaust, The Allies knew. But they didn’t believe it, or didn’t want to. My newly purchased milk is already going sour. There is a tube strike that has caused the entire tube to shut for the day. The weather for the ASI boat party this evening looks like being very grim and grey.

At least England haven’t lost another wicket before lunch. 88-3. Not good, but not catastrophic. Or not yet.

I had this complicated posting in the works, but, as often happens, it got too complicated. Usually, in these circumstances, I fob you off with a quota photo of that Pavlova statue. This time I thought I’d fob you off a quota White Van instead.

This is another of those “memo to self” postings. Well, really, all the postings here are memos to self, but this one is more than usually of that sort.

Earlier today, I managed, at last, finally, to do a Samizdata posting, after a gap of well over a month. It seems to have been quite well received, which is very nice, but really the big thing for me now is that I have done it, well received or not.

And in the course of doing it, I think I have identified an error in my thinking about how I should be writing for Samizdata. I think I was in the grip of what “writing for Samizdata” was supposed to be, for me, and what writing for Samizdata was supposed to be was writing one or nearly one Samizdata posting per day. And then, there came a time when I was unable to do this. And since I couldn’t do it, I pretty much stopped doing it. By aiming at too difficult a target, I was failing, day after day, and that made me just give up totally. That is very silly. But that, I think, is part of what was happening.

But now I think the time has come (in fact the change is long overdue) to revise my model of what writing for Samizdata should now, for me, mean. Me writing for Samizdata means not that I post something on Samizdata pretty much every day, but rather, that I work on my next Samizdata posting, pretty much every day. This means, for example, that by close of play tomorrow, I should have made some headway, not necessarily very much headway, just some headway, towards doing another posting there. The sequence of events will be: decide what to write about at Samizdata, and then start. Make some headway every day. Work at it. Polish it. Try to make it good. When it is good, or seems so, then publish. And if that takes a week, it takes a week. The idea of doing something once a day survives, but not in the form of a finished blog posting once a day, just some work on a blog posting, every day. Believe it or not, I took several days to concoct this latest posting, coming back to it again and again. And that felt like the way I should now be doing it.

The thing is, posting something here every day is quite easy. Not a total breeze you understand, but quite easy. This is because my standards here are very low. When I say something, I do mean something, aka anything. But Samizdata demands stuff that is better than that. It demands stuff that has been polished, worked on, really thought about. In 2005 you could shovel any old junk onto Samizdata and get thousands of readers, and we did, and actually it was pretty good stuff because we had all spent the previous quarter of a century thinking about it, and because we knew that thousands of people were reading it, and commenting in their hundreds. Now, that doesn’t work, or not for me. I now feel that Samizdata, unlike this place, needs better than just any old thing if it is to compete with the mainstream internet media, as it now does.

It may not be as dramatic a photo as this one of it, but I do like this:

There was a time when Modernism was supposed to destroy Ancientism. Now, the two sit happily next to one another, and quite right too. This aesthetic cohabitation began as a grudging political necessity. Ancientism wasn’t going to roll over and die, it turned out. Now, people have come to like the contrast. And when I say “people”, I mean “I”.

Today I was out and about in the sweltering heat of London, and unusually for me, I found myself noticing a news item:

The news item being that big cloud of smoke, somewhere up river from Tate Modern. Seeing as how I myself live up river from Tate Modern, this was a bit troubling. Was it a moderately big fire, quite near to me? Would I return home to find my home ablaze? Had I started the fire by leaving something switched on that shouldn’t have been? Or was it, as I found myself ignobly hoping, a bigger fire, further away?

I consulted the www about this fire when I got home, my home not having disappeared, and there being no smoke anywhere near it. Eventually the www revealed what had happened. The fire was - and alas, as I write this, it still is - in Perivale, which is way out in the west of London. And this was one very big conflagration.

An enormous fire is raging in a warehouse in a west London suburb, with smoke visible for miles around.

Some 100 firefighters are tackling the inferno at a large building in Wadsworth Road, Perivale.

About 30 people fled before the London Fire Brigade arrived, with flames erupting just before 7pm.

That’s what I was seeing, no question about it.

According to my camera, the above photo was taken at 8pm, so the fire had already been raging for an hour before I noticed it enough to take photos of it. Not that photoing smoke is my forte. Presumably photoing smole is like photoing anything else in particular, the more you do it, the better you do it.

No matter. Many others will undoubtedly have been photoing that same huge cloud of smoke. It was, like the ES said, visible for miles around. You’ll have no difficulty finding better Perivale warehouse fire pictures, in the event that you want to see such things. For me, it is enough to know that nobody died.

A BIT LATER: Looking at the above photo, and at some of the others at the other end of the link immediately above (notably the one from beyond Tower Bridge) I realise that one of the tricks of smoke-photoing is the put the smoke behind a very definite and recognisable building. So here is another photo I took, of some of the smoke that had already travelled a bit further, to the area behind St Pauls Cathedral from where I was:

Trouble is, although St Pauls is very definitely St Pauls, the smoke is not so definitely smoke. It could just be clouds, in my photo. Like I say, smoke is not a speciality of mine.

As you can also see, there is a crane to be seen there. I also photoed smoke behind a crane cluster, but showing you that would be to change the subject.

This posting is not so much me passing on advice as me seeking to solidify some ludicrously overdue advice from me to myself, about how to photograph speakers.

Don’t try to do it when they’re speaking.

Last night I took about two dozen photos of Dominic Frisby, who was addressing the Libertarian Home crowd at the Two Chairmen pub in Westminster. Almost all these photos were useless. This was because Frisby was talking, and when people talk, they move. The indoor light was very scarce, so the slightest motion meant a blur, and a succession of blurs was accordingly all that I got. My only photographic successes during the Frisby talk were when I switched my attention to the people listening to him. They were keeping still.

As to what Frisby said (on the subject of Bitcoin), well, it was all videoed, although the video camera was being hand-held, as this further snap of Richard Carey, helping out with that, illustrates:

I include that snap also because of the John Lilburne reference, Lilburne being a man whom we libertarians should be bigging up every chance we get.

Finally, a book photo. On account of Frisby’s talk beginning a few minutes earlier than I had been expecting it to, I arrived a few minutes late, and the only seat I could find was the one with Frisby’s books on it, which he had presumably earlier been sitting at. That explains the odd angle of this photo:

Both books highly recommended. More about Frisby by me (+ further links) in this Samizdata posting. In this I mentioned that Frisby was working on a Bitcoin book. As you can see, that book has now materialised.

It helps that books, like people who are listening, or for that matter doing photography, and unlike people who are talking, do not move.

Yesterday I wrote here about the twenty-first century social obligation to use a mobile phone when meeting up with someone, because of the problems this solves and despite the problems this creates. Hence the need for me to take my mobile phone with me when going photowalkabout with G(od)D(aughter) 1.

But, on Saturday evening, the evening before GD1 and I went on our walk, I was very nearly deprived of my mobile phone, by which I mean deprived of the ability to make use of it.

What happened was that, while I was also out and about on Saturday evening, a baritone-singing student friend of mezzo-soprano-singing student G(od)D(aughter) 2, sought the help of GD2. His mobile had run out of puff and needed a recharge. GD2 uses an iPhone, but Baritone has an Android mobile, so Baritone could not use GD2’s recharger. What to do?

Between them they decided that I and my Android recharger might be the answer. I guess that GD2 then rang me on my immobile home number and discovered that I was out. Then, knowing my aversion and incompetence as a mobile phoner, and especially as a reliable receiver of incoming mobile messages, she did not not attempt to ring me on my mobile. Or, she did try my mobile and I did not answer.

For various reasons that I still don’t understand and which in any case do not now matter, Baritone ended up coming to my home, armed with GD2’s key to my home, and having made his entrance, he “borrowed” my mobile phone recharger.

I want to emphasise that the above quote marks are not sneer quotes. They are confusion quotes.

For, what exactly does it mean to “borrow” a mobile phone charger? What GD2 meant, when she assured Baritone that it would okay for him to “borrow” my phone charger, was that it would be okay for him to charge up his mobile phone, using my charger at my home. As indeed it would have been.

However, Baritone misunderstood this assurance to mean that it would be okay for him to “borrow” my charger, as in: take it away and make use it throughout Saturday evening, in other places besides mine. I don’t believe that Baritone would have done this without that assurance from GD2, as he understood it. After all, whereas charging up your mobile in situ is socially very okay, taking a charger away without permission is surely a twenty-first century social gaff of the first order. But, Baritone thought that he had permission to do this otherwise unacceptable thing. GD2 is adamant that she gave no such permission, but I believe that Baritone genuinely thought that this unusual procedure was, in the light of GD2’s assurance, okay. He made this clear in a written thankyou note he left on my desk.

And it normally would have been okay. Had I not been going on an expedition the following day with GD1, then the charger could have made its way back to my home some time on or around Sunday, and all would have been fine. But, for all the reasons that were explained in the previous posting, I needed that charger by quite early on Sunday morning at the latest.

So, despite GD2s protestations, I acquit Baritone of wrongdoing.

But then again, Baritone is a baritone. And baritones often behave very badly, quite often at the expense of notably virtuous mezzo-sopranos. So maybe I’m being too kind.

All was speedily corrected by GD2, who was rather insulted by the profuseness of my thanks when she brought my charger back at 8am on Sunday morning. Of course I got your charger back. (See what I mean about virtuous mezzo-sopranos.)

It was just as well that I did get it back. In addition to using my mobile for all that meeting up at the start of the day, I also used it for its map app, and to tell me how Surrey were doing against Gloucester. Very well, as it happened. Nothing like your sports team winning to keep you going when you are knackered.

However, I now understand better why people have cameras with mobile phones built into them. What with my bag and all, I was having constantly to choose between knowing where I was, and photoing it.

Surrey are on a bit of a roll just now. This evening they beat Gloucester again, in a T20 slog at the Oval. Surrey needed a mere six runs from the last four balls. So, how did they get them? The last four balls went: wicket, dot, dot, six. In English that’s: probable Surrey victory, possible Surrey victory, almost impossible Surrey victory, Surrey victory. I got that off my laptop, but I could have got it from my mobile, if I had been out and about. Provided it hadn’t run out of puff.